In Pursuit of Measuring Pre-reflective Music Listening Experiences

Abstract

While the diverse effects and uses of music and sound have been extensively documented within music psychology, relatively little attention has been paid to the process and experience of listening itself. Previous literature have, however, considered different ways of attending to sounds via the concept of listening modes, which highlights the different ways and strategies through which listeners intentionally orientate themselves to the activity of listening and creating the experiential meaning of the sound. In this paper, we continue on these lines by focusing on the very basic attentional dispositions for listening that often remain unconscious. As opposed to more deliberate and intentional listening strategies, this pre-reflective domain of listening is characterised by its receptive quality, that is, being attuned to sound in a pre-conceptual and pre-cognitive manner without cognitive appraisal of its meaning. Based on previous theoretisations and following ideas from embodied and enactive cognition, we re-conceptualise pre-reflective listening through five modes of listening. Moreover, in order to bring these theoretical considerations into dialogue with empirical research we also operationalise the suggested listening modes into prototyped survey items and discuss methodological issues with the aim of building a groundwork for developing psychometric measures of pre-reflective music listening experiences.